Movie Update 7

Do I really have nothing significant to get off my chest about any of these movies, or am I just getting lazy? You decide.

À Nos Amours


Amours is another film in the Incredibly Painful to Watch Family Drama style, this time coming from France. It's about a girl who doesn't know what she wants out of life, and has a difficult relationship with her parents and brother, and the only way she knows how to cope with both is to spend time with a variety of men. She's not sure she's capable of loving anyone, while at the same time she gets guys to fall for her. It's not very pleasant to watch, but that's why it's a success. It's a very real seeming movie, and the reality it presents isn't pretty. The dad is the most interesting character, I wish he had more scenes.

The Cotton Club


The Cotton Club is sort of like a Boardwalk Empire movie with a lot of singing and dancing and not much else. Richard Gere stars as a New York musician who gets involved with gangsters, falls in love with one of their girlfriends, and then uh... the plot kind of trails off. There's also a plot about a pair of tap dancing brothers. The movie is more about the famous club itself than a real story, and I felt this hurt it quite a bit. It's not bad, there's just not much of an arc there. Things happen for a while and then they stop. A very young Diane Lane looks nice, Nick Cage gives a wacky early performance, and James Remar is pretty awful as the big bad gangster. Bob Hoskins is better as one of his business partners. Apparently Gere played his own trumpet for this movie, which is kinda cool. Bottom line, when your director made The Godfather, you kind of expect more from the other organized crime movies he makes than this.

Duck Soup


I've seen bits of Marx Brothers movies before, but this is the first time I watched one all the way through. It's pretty short, and packed to the brim with hysterical scenes. It's sort of the perfect blend of silent movie slapstick with modern witty dialogue. Groucho is appointed the leader of a country called Freedonia, and spends more time coming on to women and screwing around than directing policy. Chico and Harpo are spies for a conniving foreign ambassador, and also screw around a lot more than they do their jobs. Zeppo is the one who never developed a funny personality of his own, and he's basically just there, in his last film with his brothers. There's a lot of great lines and funny set-ups, though to be honest the hardest I laughed the whole time was at a couple scenes where Harpo was just being a douchebag to a street vendor. The fact that he never really got his comeuppance somehow makes the whole thing better. The mirror scene is a classic, too. I definitely want to see more of their movies together.

The Graduate


The first two films Mike Nichols ever directed were Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and this, which is pretty damn impressive. It features the great Dustin Hoffman's first big role as a college graduate who doesn't know what he want out of his life when he is seduced by the wife of his dad's business partner. From there, things get more complicated. The style of the film is really great, with every shot seeming to be carefully chosen, and I liked the unusual nature of the main performances. The integration of Simon and Garfunkel tunes into the film works well, too. It's too funny to be a drama and not really that terribly funny for a comedy, but it straddles the line well, and it's just a unique, memorably movie. Not much about it I didn't like.

Gran Torino

I think this is a movie that would have benefited if Clint Eastwood wasn't the only person from it you've heard of. Not that a movie needs stars to be good, or that there isn't a reason he went with an unknown cast. It's just the acting in general is pretty bad besides Eastwood itself, and when you're dealing with the delicate race issues the story addresses, bad actors sort of exacerbates the issue. Some scenes become downright laughable when they should be dramatic and tense. Eastwood's direction is good enough, and the story interesting enough, that the film is mostly able to overcome a lot of these flaws, I still found it to be more of a pretty interesting experiment than a truly good movie, though. I kind of liked that his character really is just a total racist who ends up mixed up in something where he can do some good, rather than it being something hokey like a misguided old man who eventually sees the error of his ways. A very simple movie that I think could have been better.

La Jetée


This is a short film composed entirely of still images. It was an inspiration for the film 12 Monkeys. If you know about 12 Monkeys, you can guess that this short film is about time travel, and you'd be right. The story is pretty intriguing if light on actual detail, and has a pretty haunting ending. Very cool experiment more than a real movie.

The Spirit of the Beehive


A Spanish film that is probably some sort of metaphor or allegory based on how it went. Shortly after their civil war, a child watches Frankenstein and becomes enchanted with the idea of spirits. It's a slow paced movie without a ton of dialogue or plot, but it does some interesting things with the classic tale and has a mood that enhances it greatly beyond the simple workings of the story. The direction, lighting, editing, and performances all combine to create a very chilling, dreamy atmosphere. It's the kind of movie that I recognize as good, but make me glad I decided to stop writing a full review for everything I see. I just don't have many words for it.

This Is Spinal Tap


The quintessential mockumentary. I was a bit surprised by the general flow of the movie, which didn't have as many wacky laugh-out-loud moments as I expected, and actually made sure to tell a real story about friendship and growing old with its silly fake hair metal band. The film follows around Spinal Tap when their star has faded, and they find themselves playing smaller venues than they're used to and struggling to put out a new album with their artistic vision intact. It's a funny movie, but it's also a very poignant one. And while the jokes aren't constant, they're still generally really good ones, especially whenever Christopher Guest is on the screen. Obviously "but this goes to 11" is the classic, but I also really loved him showing Rob Reiner the piano piece he'd been working on and especially his reaction to the album cover that was chosen for them. I should get around to checking out some of the movies he directed himself.

Werckmeister Harmonies


A film by Béla Tarr, the master of the long take. Harmonies is probably most famous for lasting over two hours yet being composed of only 39 individual shots, though the camera moves so much within a scene that if you saw several still images from one take you'd assume they were all different shots. Not that you don't feel the effect of the unique filming style, lots of time is spent showing characters perform mundane tasks for minutes on end, which helps create a mood that is unique to his work. The movie works because it has a haunting story and features a number of extremely striking images throughout, images which have their power enhanced by the way they're lingered on. Besides the style though, the rest of the movie didn't grab me that much. I just can't get interested in the stories themselves, despite the way Tarr presents them. I'd recommend it to someone before Satantango if they were interested in checking out his work, if only because it isn't seven hours long.

For a Few Dollars More

The second film in the trilogy is a nice intermediary in terms of length, epicness, and major supporting cast. Gian Maria Volontè returns as a villain once more, Lee Van Cleef is an ally of the nameless man before he'd be a foe in the sequel, and Clint Eastwood is yet again the hardened man with no name. Interestingly, the protagonist here is supposedly not the same person as the one in the previous movie, or at least that's what Sergio Leone claimed and convinced the courts after he had a falling out with that movie's producer and he sued for whatever rights were involved with the character. It doesn't really need to be though, as the character is more of a western archetype than a fully developed person. As usual, the people around him have more involved backgrounds and character development, while he's just there being a bad ass.

The story's about how Eastwood and Cleef, as maybe an older and wiser version of the same character, run into each other as they both pursue the bounty on Volontè and his gang's heads and decide to split the ransom and work together. The friendship isn't exactly a fast one, and they spend almost as much time at odds with each other as they do with the real bad guys. Eastwood spends some time infiltrating the gang and yet again getting caught and having his ass kicked, but eventually they get their shot when the villain, high on drugs and still hung up on events earlier in his life, makes a lot of strange, bad decisions. His eventual downfall is as much his fault as anyone else's. I hope it's not a spoiler that he dies, but if it is... well come on, dude. As is standard with Leone's films, the introductions of the characters and clever final showdown are the best parts, although the middle here might actually be the most enjoyable of the three movies. It doesn't reach the awesome heights of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly's best moments, but it's a solid movie all the way through.

A Fistful of Dollars

Dollars is the first film in Sergio Leone's famous spaghetti western trilogy, and also the shortest. It begins with a stylized, rotoscoped opening credits sequence, which the third film imitated. As with nearly every western I've seen now, the opening and closing scenes are pretty darn cool, but the stuff in the middle drags. Thankfully it doesn't last too long. The whole story is more or less a remake of Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo, a samurai film which itself borrowed from the same stories by Dashiell Hammett that led to the Coen brothers' Miller's Crossing. So it's the familiar tale of a loner playing two factions against each other to his own benefit, and even rips ideas from Yojimbo wholesale like the hardened killer being unsure of how many coffins the undertaker should make as a result of his introductory exploits.

As a beginning to Leone's work in the genre, it's a nice debut. The fact that he actually lost a lawsuit with Kurosawa that claimed it was a rip-off makes it hard to credit the originality, but it did a nice job of turning it into a natural feeling western. The man with no name character is an intriguing one, because he's not really on the law's side in any real sense, but he still has enough good in him to take it upon himself to rescue an innocent family at the cost of his own capture. He's a nice mix of clever, human, and plain old bad ass that he's fun to watch no matter what he's doing. Gian Maria Volontè is a pretty capable villain, angry but still intelligent, and returns in the next movie as a different character. For being a cheap Italian production, it's a watchable enough representation of something very American.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Ugly is the third film in a trilogy by Sergio Leone and starring Clint Eastwood as the "man with no name", and is the biggest budgeted, most epic, and most successful of the bunch. I hadn't seen the first two yet, but I figured it would be okay since it's a prequel set during the Civil War. Quentin Tarantino has called this the best-directed film of all time, and I can see why he might say that. I don't agree, but the movie does a whole hell of a lot right.

The thing about the film is the first fifty minutes and the last twenty are absolutely outstanding; it's just that the hundred minutes in the middle are merely decent. Leone takes the first half hour just to introduce the three leads. Eastwood is "The Good", a protagonist who we root for but never mistake for a particularly good person beyond a few instances of acting nobly. Lee Van Cleef is "The Bad", a hardened killer who's trying to track down a confederate soldier. The sequence that establishes his character is unfortunately the best thing we'll see out of him, but at least it's excellent. And Eli Wallach is "The Ugly", a bandit with constantly fluctuating luck who actually sees the most screen time and character development of the three. He might be the most interesting of the bunch. The first ten minutes or so don't even have dialogue, as Leone shows he can film the hell out of any shootout of showdown you can throw at him. Things eventually bog down once they start marching through the desert, and it's never bad, just the standard western problem of spending too much time not playing to its strengths. There are plenty of good sequences, like when the good and the ugly team up against a group of the bad's thugs, it just drags as a whole. They get to an elaborate scene where union and confederate forces are facing off over a bridge, and it's an impressively large-scale setpiece that I would have liked more if I gave a crap about it.

Eventually though they make it to their intended destination, and we have one of the greatest face-offs in film history. The whole final sequence is a perfect case of the score making the movie better. It might even be better than the direction. Just look at the iconic main theme, using a different instrument for each lead, and which while repeated constantly throughout the film is never once not welcome. "The Ecstasy of Gold" at a moment of great emotional relief is brilliant, and then what plays during the duel is some of the best tension-building music I've ever heard in a film. Clint is almost too badass to live in the last scene and the climax is really just about perfect for the movie. Really, the only thing that dragged the movie down besides the length was the dubbing. The movie was shot silently with a multilingual cast and every line had to be dubbed over. Most of the supporting cast were speaking Spanish or Italian and when you watch them talk it's just hard to take the movie completely seriously. The three leads all spoke English but were still often hit-or-miss with their delivery. I mean, how hard is it to figure out that you might sound different if there's a cigar or wine cork in your mouth? Three hours was too long for this story, but I enjoyed it quite a bit for the most part.

Unforgiven

Let me just take a moment to acknowledge David Peoples, a screenwriter who without me realizing it until now has written screenplays for three movies I've liked and blogged about in the last year and a half; this, 12 Monkeys, and Blade Runner. That's a pretty diverse and impressive list. Good on you, Peoples.

Anyway, Unforgiven is probably the best western I've ever seen. It's not the normal easy moral tale where some kindhearted gunslinger saves the township from evil bandits. There's no good guys or bad guys in this movie, just people on opposite sides of things. Clint Eastwood directed and stars as a former tough son of a bitch who got domesticated by his now-dead wife, but has to return to killing for the money. Morgan Freeman is his old partner who agrees to come along. Gene Hackman won an Oscar for his performance as the sheriff of the town the story revolves around, and he's equal parts dedicated lawman and vicious bastard. Richard Harris shows up as a dishonest gunman known as English Bob, and he's mostly there to give Hackman something to do while Eastwood and his posse take their good damn time getting to the plot. The movie seemed a bit slow in places, but I find that to be a common malady of the western genre, and the movie is well-written and well-put together enough to keep it from ever getting too dull.

Basically, some whores put together some money for a bounty on a couple cowboys outside Hackman's law, and Eastwood makes the long journey to try and collect. Obviously they end up at odds, and despite it not being the reason for the journey, the resolution of their conflict is the story's climax. It's an interesting, dark movie, one that shows the supposed violence of the time without ever once glorifying it. It's heavy without being heavy handed, and both manages to convey a message and simply deliver a clever, violent western if that's all you're looking for. I found it to be well deserving of its many awards, and got me interested in some other work by Eastwood.